So many of these activities happen in the early stages of a customer’s app journey — usually the first hours or days. Then what? Should you just wait for them to come back?

Your customers will spend most of their mobile app journey with your brand in the Engagement phase as you work to maximize their monetization and create app loyalists. That only happens by continually driving customers back into the app.

Your app’s Engagement Score (DAUs/MAUs) is a good indication of how well you’re generating traffic. Our benchmark data shows that after a slight dip in Q3 of 2022, Engagement Scores have been steadily increasing and now sit at their highest point in over a year at 19%.

Push to Pull Customers into Apps 
Push notifications are the natural mechanism for driving customers back into your app. It’s worth noting that using targeted push notifications improves the open rate by 76% over non-targeted notifications.

But push notifications aren’t the only channel you should be using to drive app visits. In an omnichannel world, consumers consume information across channels in an almost seamless manner. What’s important to them is that you present them with relevant and contextual information, which demonstrates that you know them and are listening to them. Amplifying those messages, and coordinating them across channels, reinforces your commitment and respect for their continued brand loyalty. 

You Never Write!
At most brands, email is an important promotional channel, but often operates in a silo. Beyond encouraging the initial app download, email campaigns do not typically focus on driving mobile app re-engagement.

Today’s leading mobile app marketers leverage email, push notifications and SMS to drive traffic to the app. Then, onboarding and adoption experiences can guide customers to complete high-value actions that monetize their visit.

We’ve Got This
If you haven’t already explored adding Airship’s email and SMS capabilities to increase your app traffic, you’ll want to evaluate how these powerful add-ons can aid mobile app marketers and drive more app revenue. It’s an easy way to save money and stretch your budget.

To learn more about how Airship can drive more app visits, increase your Engagement Score and save you money on email, contact your Account Manager or support@airship.com. 

Navigator is Airship’s customer newsletter covering the latest mobile app industry trends, product updates, use cases and best practices, and other learning resources. It’s yet another resource to help you deliver better mobile app experiences and create greater value more quickly. If you’d like to receive our monthly Navigator newsletter, please sign up here.

The post Don’t Just Wait For Traffic. Generate It. appeared first on Airship.

When enabled, Apple will download all remote data in the background by default, resulting in inaccurate open metrics for these recipients, and data collected from the IP address, such as location, will be masked. Email platforms and email marketers are rapidly trying to determine its impact on open rates and how to address this. 

Luckily, we are here to help! Here are steps marketers can take now and in the future to adjust to this new feature and improve their overall email experience for their customers.

Make Sure to Cleanse Your List

The first action you can take now is to cleanse your lists. Even without Apple’s changes, this is just a best practice for maintaining good deliverability. Here’s how you can do that:

Use the open metrics you have today to construct buckets of recent-engagers vs non-engagers.  This depends on how often you send emails, but recent engagers could consist of people who have opened an email in the past 60-90 days. 

Then, set up a reactivation campaign for the non-engagers to try and get them interested and interacting again, but after 90 days of no opens or clicks, the relationship has probably run its course, and it’s time to say goodbye. Taking these steps now will set you up to have clean lists come September when we expect Apple to release their updates.  

Check Your Inbox Placement

Inbox placement (making sure your emails are going into the right inbox instead of spam) is going to be even more important once updates are released. You should make looking at your inbox placement a regular routine, especially to detect early warnings of deliverability issues. If you’re not already doing this, there are tools available to track your emails (like Sparkpost’s Inbox Tracker).

Adjust Your Email Benchmarks 

As for measuring engagement, benchmarks will have to be adjusted and clicks will become more important. Clicks are a more direct measurement of engagement since an email open doesn’t always mean “interested.” 

Opens can be detected when a message is previewed, or like in the case of Apple’s coming changes, when a message is preloaded by the client.  However, there are times when opens are the best engagement metric available (as in the case of subject line testing or informative emails that don’t have a strong call-to-action). In this case, the baseline open rate across a brand’s own campaigns and benchmarks across verticals will need to be adjusted to the inflated open metrics we expect from Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection change.

Move on from Bulk Marketing Strategies 

One of the most important things you can do for your email program is to shift from a bulk marketing strategy to a hyper-targeted one. This ensures your customers are getting the most relevant message for them, which will make them more likely to engage. By offering a preference center, you give control to the customer to manage which types of communications they get. This allows them to opt down instead of having to be all-in or all-out with your brand’s messaging. 

You can easily implement this with Airship by creating a preference center with our drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor and including the link to the form (that Airship hosts!) in your email. We’ll manage the opt-ins & opt-outs of the different subscription lists, so you don’t have to. 

Go for the T and T: Targeted and Triggered

Keep information timely and relevant with targeted and triggered messages. Utilize the power of app+email, by using personalized email to drive customers to your app for more information that is interesting to them. 

A great way to do this is to use Airship Journeys to create messaging flows triggered off of actions your customers have taken. For instance, if someone makes a purchase, trigger an email with the order information and populate a row of recommended products by pulling in content from your recommendations engine using our External Data Feeds. Follow up with a push that upsells them on a related item. By personalizing content throughout the journey with the data relevant right at the time of send, you’ll keep your messaging timely and interesting.

A consistent focus on improving and elevating the email program is key to relevant customer experience. By using a preference center and other personalization tools that Airship offers, you can deliver that kind of experience to your customers. We’re here to help you navigate all the changes that come with privacy and iOS. 

Get Personal

Give your customers the personalized experience they want

We can help!

The post 5 Steps Marketers Can Take to Improve Their Emails (Especially with Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection) appeared first on Airship.

Order Confirmation

Personalized SMS and email messages are no-brainers for order confirmations and pickup details. But if you want to build a next level experience, try delivering personalized Mobile Wallet passes via email or SMS. Wallet passes make it easier for customers to keep track of their orders. And they tend to hang onto those passes, giving you another way to stay engaged! You’ll also want to encourage app downloads and opt-ins so that customers can take advantage of BOPIS 2.0 features like arrival detection and live in-app chat.

Pre-Pickup

Next, leverage location to create a more seamless pickup experience for customers and staff with Airship’s integration with Radar. Radar’s trip tracking functionality lets you track an order and a trip to a store for order-ahead and send events to Airship when a customer is on the way, approaching and arriving. With Airship, those events can be used in real-time to trigger personalized messages that provide incredible value to both customers and brands. 

For example, when a customer is close to a store, send an automated push notification with pickup information. Or launch a Live Chat opportunity with an agent who can help answer questions and provide details about the order or pickup process. Plus, these events are surfaced in existing in-store systems or a turnkey Radar dashboard, enabling staff to start prepping the order at the right time, cutting down on wait times and improving CX. 

On-premise

Once a customer arrives, whether they’re collecting a BOPIS order or just browsing, use geofencing to drive on-premise Mobile App and Mobile Wallet engagement. Send a personalized SMS message to encourage them to download your app or sign up for your loyalty program. Target push notifications with special offers, loyalty features and information that drives more app opens. Or use purchase history to upsell or add on products during order fulfillment.

Post-Pickup

The post-pickup period offers a wealth of often underutilized opportunities to engage and upsell. Improve CX through helpful follow up messaging with assembly instructions or prep details. Use in-app, SMS and email driven surveys to understand customer sentiment. Create a lasting connection by updating Mobile Wallet passes with coupons and offers after orders are picked up. And drive continuous engagement by orchestrating personalized post-purchase Airship Journeys to upsell, cross sell and drive repeat purchases. 

With Airship’s customer engagement platform and Radar’s location solutions, you can create seamless end-to-end experiences that customers love, driving store traffic, building long-term relationships and more. To learn more about how Airship can help power a winning BOPIS experience for your brand, contact us today!

LET’S CONNECT

Want to Build Better BOPIS Experiences?

Contact us today!

The post How to Build Better BOPIS Experiences with Airship + Radar appeared first on Airship.

Let’s look at how three brands are using Airship’s platform to meet those challenges with highly effective cross-channel campaigns.

Redhawk Casino Goes Omnichannel

Red Hawk Casino leverages Airship Orchestration to ensure they’re using the right channel and the best timing for each message. A cross-channel welcome series helps onboard customers and educate them about key features. Dynamic emails keep them informed of the week’s sales and promotions. SMS reminders go out right before an event, promotion, or last minute COVID-19-related schedule change. And Redhawk uses push messages for day-of communications and time-sensitive offers. 

Redhawk Digital Marketing Specialist Matthew Borja explains that “during COVID, having the ability to reach our customers through multiple channels allowed us to build up and grow our brand affinity, when so many brands are struggling to get customer attention. We were able to save over 30% by switching to Airship and using it for multiple channels, helping us reach more customers at lower cost.”

Betbull Keeps Customers Engaged with Airship Journeys

Sports betting brand Betbull uses Airship Journeys to automate and orchestrate messages across SMS and email to keep customers engaged in the Betbull mobile app and informed about promotions and bonus offers. Betbull credits Airship with making it easier to build customer journeys that reach customers on the right channels and generate some of their best engagement to-date.

“It’s taken a huge operational workload off of the team,” said John Ibanez, CRM manager with Betbull. “Airship has been a game changer for us through COVID-19 for our customer retention and engagement efforts. We’ve seen our biggest engagement numbers ever.”

Getplus Prevents Dropoff with Email + App Personalization

Indonesia’s GetPlus helps its members obtain discounts and offers from a variety of retailers when purchasing within the app. GetPlus’ strategy during COVID-19 is all about personalization. They use Airship to trigger seamless, personalized welcome journeys and voucher reminders via email, in-app messaging and push notifications that prevent drop-off after signup and keep customers active in the app.

Plus, Airship helped GetPlus rapidly integrate their existing engagement platforms and start handling all of their customer engagement from one place. According to Co-Founder Adrian Hoon, “With Airship’s support, we were able to quickly onboard and start executing campaigns. It gave us an ability to get going much faster.” 

As these brands have shown, email+app are a dynamic duo in your channel mix that can keep customers engaged and build a lifetime of loyalty and value. To learn more about how Airship can help elevate your customer engagement strategy, get in touch!

LEt’s Connect

Want to elevate your email+app engagement strategy?

Contact us today!

The post How Three Brands Used Email + App to Increase Engagement During COVID-19 appeared first on Airship.

Not sure where to begin? Here are a few tips to get you going.

Love Your Layout

Have you updated your branding or are your layouts feeling a little stale? Of course, you need an attractive and on-brand look that grabs customers’ attention. But you also need a logical layout that leads subscribers toward engagement.

Use graphics and visual dividers to help readers recognize the different content sections and CTAs. Keep the text to image ratio around 80:20, meaning 80% text and 20% images. And if you do use a lot of images, always include alt text. This helps ensure there’s enough copy to get your point across if images aren’t displayed properly due to spam filters or email client behavior.

It’s also a great time to revisit your footer. Make sure it’s up-to-date and consider adding some  text to the footer to provide customers with useful information about your brand.

Make Your Messages Count

Your subject lines are your first impressions. The key is to keep them informative and simple with a 40-70 character message that gets straight to the point. It’s also a good idea to convey a sense of urgency in your headlines. However, avoid the temptation to use deceptive subject lines, which can erode trust and land your emails in spam folders.

Furthermore, while many marketers overlook the importance of the preheader, that extra 35-50 characters can give your audience a little more info about why they should click open. Just keep in mind that if your audience tends to read messages on mobile, your combined subject line and preheader shouldn’t exceed 100 characters or they may get cut off.

In the email body, put your most important messages and CTAs in the spotlight by placing them above the fold, typically the top 350 pixels of your email. Try not to overload readers’ eyes by cramming too much in this limited real estate. Users will scroll, as long as you give them great reasons to. Use this area to convey your main message and deliver on the promise of your subject line. Also, avoid creating a false bottom, so it’s clear there’s more to see below the fold.

Test for Success

Before rolling out your new look, test your designs to ensure they look fabulous on all browsers, devices and clients. Use Airship’s WYSIWYG editor to drag-and-drop content blocks and edit on the fly to create beautiful and responsive designs. Then you can leverage our integration with Litmus to quickly see what your message looks like across apps and devices, and identify issues before your message hits inboxes.

Next, run A/B tests to determine which approaches garner the most engagement. We recently rolled out new A/B testing features for email, SMS, web and app that make it super simple to test personalization and design to determine which variants deliver the best results. 

Once your campaigns are live, keep an eye on analytics to help assess the performance of your new designs and optimize as needed. Key metrics to monitor include opens and clicks, link clicks and performance on different domains (e.g. gmail, outlook, etc.).

Accessorize with Airship

Get ready for your next steps with Airship’s content creation, personalization and A/B testing features. Improve your campaign creation process and design eloquent messages with:

• Airship’s WYSIWYG editor: Drag-and-drop blocks of content to edit inline and create different variations to evaluate and test.
• Litmus for Email (New!): Optimize for the best customer experience by previewing how your email looks across different devices and making changes if needed. 
• A/B Testing personalization for SMS, Email, Web and App (New!): Use our personalization features with A/B tests to optimize your message personalization to see what increases customer engagement. Test different image types based on customer preferences, varying levels of personalization, or amount of content.
• Performance Analytics: Pre-built email reports and dashboards help you drill down on essential data points and view performance.

With these tools and strategies, you’re on your way to creating more coordinated, head-turning emails that earn attention and engagement in the year ahead. To learn more about how Airship can help, get in touch!

Let’s go 2021

Need help turning inspiration into reality? We can help you put together an email strategy that wins over customers.

Contact us today!

The post New Year, New Look: Give Your Email Campaigns a 2021 Makeover appeared first on Airship.

Create Custom Email Templates

WYSIWYG!

That stands for “What You See Is What You Get” (we like to pronounce it wi-see-wig), and that’s exactly what you’ll get with the email editor in the template sections of the UI (user interface). Brands can make their email templates look exactly the way they want them to, easily dragging and dropping content blocks to where you want them and editing the content and display. You can add new content blocks where needed or merge fields, like names, loyalty numbers and account balances to add more personalization to your emails. 

Alternatively, marketers also have the choice of simply uploading full HTML to quickly send out an email that you’ve already created.  However you make your email template, you’ll be able to save it and access it for editing at any time!

Easily Store and Select the Right Templates

We’re also making it easier than ever to send out your emails in record time. Templates can simply be selected in the composer UI or with their template ID in the create-and-send API.  After creating your custom template within the WYSIWYG editor, you’ll be able to simply choose the template for that message and send.

Stored templates are also available for SMS, MMS and the Open Channel API, making it more streamlined to send out those time-sensitive or rinse-and-repeat style messages that need to go out quickly across channels.

Make Email Part of Your Customer Engagement Strategy

Consumers are flooded with emails on a daily basis (about 73 per day!), making it difficult to stand out from the crowd.  But with engaging content and relevant messages, you can make your emails a unique customer experience every time.

With Airship, not only can you now make customized email content, you can also take advantage of a single UI to create, deploy and then coordinate your email messaging with all your engagement channels.  Use Airship’s channel coordination capabilities, such as brand priority or fall back channels, to automate and optimize your channel selection. Use email when it is most effective, or set custom event and tag triggers to automatically send emails when they are most relevant to your customers.

How Can Airship Improve Your Email Personalization Strategy?

Let’s Connect

The post Email the Way You Want It – The All New Template Builder appeared first on Airship.

The challenge for brands is finding the best way to deliver personalized content efficiently (without exhausting marketing resources everytime a campaign needs to be sent) and at scale. The best way to do both is to leverage Dynamic Content.

Dynamic Content is a tool for adapting content based on user preferences in the two channels customers with the highest engagement rates: email and SMS.

Benefits of Using Dynamic Content for Personalization

Dynamic content has gained popularity among marketers for personalization because it:

Saves Time: Rather than having to create a customized version of a message or campaign for each audience segment, marketers save time by having one version with automated customizations that can be sent to all subscribers. This reduces the time spent building the various required templates.

Drives Higher Conversions: Dynamic content means users are getting personalized, highly-relevant content, which results in more conversions.

How to Create Dynamic Content Campaigns

Creating Dynamic Content for your SMS and email campaigns is simpler than you might think, especially using our personalization solutions. Just follow these steps:

1) Identify Audience Segments: Group together audiences with similar traits or characteristics (i.e. those in a specific loyalty tier) and then align content to those segments.

2) Determine Layout: Once you know how many variations you’ll need you can begin determining where content blocks will go and what will be displayed to each group.

3) Add Values via CSV: Include logic (conditional comparison operators) in the content that will dictate the message users will receive based on the values uploaded through CSV. This CSV will include the channel ID, MSISDN, or email address, opt-in date and display data.

4) A/B Test: Understanding how you’ll gauge the success of each campaign and how you’ll measure user interaction with the content is critical to creating effective messages. Using Airship’s Performance Analytics you’ll be able to track user engagement across multiple campaigns.

Dynamic Content in SMS

Using Dynamic Content in SMS helps marketers make the best use of characters by providing real-time relevant content.

In SMS, dynamic content can go from simply adding your customer’s name to a message all the way to adding customized flight numbers, departure times and links.

Dynamic Content in Email

Adding Dynamic Content to your emails helps you reach your customer, not just their inbox. This added value increases open and click-through rates resulting in higher revenue yielding campaigns.

Once you understand your customer persona and you’ve determined what dynamic elements will be displayed, you can begin creating an email using the dynamic content syntax.

Since dynamic content is dependent on using persona variable data, you’ll need to add code to your email to command which content is displayed. This code tells the Airship platform which action to take and what content to display to each of your end users. In the examples below, the images are based on the shopping preferences of audiences in different segments: men’s styles, accessories and women’s styles.

Ready to dive in? Contact us and let us know how we can help! And if you’d like to go deeper on the ins and outs of coding of Dynamic Content, you can learn more on our related docs pages.

The post How to Personalize SMS and Email Messages with Dynamic Content appeared first on Airship.

That’s why automating your messages is so important for your customer experience, especially on channels where the timing of the message is crucial, like SMS. By using automation, you can set up triggers to respond to user activities with messages your customers will find relevant and useful. Brands that make use of smart automation tools are way more likely to deliver customer experiences that feel magical — and that drive ROI.

Here are three ways you can use automation to take your customer engagement strategy to the next level across SMS, Email and Open Channels.

Make the Right First Impression with First-Seen Automation

One of the most important times to reach customers is when they first interact with your brand.  That’s why we’ve created a “first-seen” trigger on our platform. This trigger is a way to automate a message after a customer interacts with your brand for the first time, such as an opt-in to text messaging, email, or other channels. You can even set up a series of welcome messages across multiple channels to further encourage new customers to make a purchase.

Respond Quickly to Loyal Customers with Tag-Change Automation

Reach your customers as soon as their status shifts with tag-change automation. For example, add a “loyalty-member” tag to your users when they join your loyalty program and utilize automation to immediately send that user a loyalty card.

New loyalty members are primed for engagement and you want to do everything you can to keep them loyal and engage. Sending loyalty cards with Urban Airship’s Mobile Wallet and Adaptive Links technology makes it even easier to send them via SMS or email and get them installed in no time!

Be There When Customers Need You Most with Event-Triggered Automation

You want to be there for your users when they want and need you most. That’s why Urban Airship allows you to create custom events that can trigger an automated personalized message and let you control the experience step-by-step. For example:

• Retailers can trigger an automated email after a purchase event to drive upsell. Custom events can also trigger smart-speaker notifications to let a customer know their order has been delivered.  
• Banks can trigger an SMS when a payment is due or when an unusual transaction is made.
• Airlines can set a trigger for a new boarding pass to be sent in real-time via SMS or email when a flight is canceled or changed.

The post Get the Timing Just Right with Automation For SMS and Email appeared first on Airship.